Genocide agenda still alive in some countries, officials warn

Officials have warned against continued Genocide agenda and called on the international community to immediately rein in Genocidal elements. Speaking during a videoconference at the British Embassy in Kigali, officials from Ibuka, a Genocide survivor organisation, the national unity and reconciliation commission, and other groups, said that a campaign was being mooted from several countries against specific people. “There is an agenda to continue with Genocide and this is worrying because there is nothing being done to stop this evil arrangement,” Oswald Rutimburana of the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission (NURC) said on Saturday. He particularly singled out DRC’s government as one of those directly working with members of a militia of mainly Genocide perpetrators – the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR). The officials were making remarks via a video link at the end of a three-day global conference on prevention of Genocide in Montreal, Canada, which was attended by Canada’s retired general Romeo Dallaire, the man who was at the helm of UN forces in Rwanda, MINUAR, at the time Genocide unfolded in 1994. Other panelists in Montreal included Professor Martha Minow of Harvard Law School and Esther Mujawayo, a survivor of the Rwanda Genocide. The Executive Secretary of Ibuka, a Genocide survivors’ umbrella, Benoit Kaboyi, said in Kigali that Genocide perpetrators and their sympathisers had turned into revisionists. He said those elements are now distorting facts with a mission of re-writing the history behind the 1994 Genocide. He cited a French journalist, Pierre Pean, who published a book denying the Genocide. In the book, ‘Noirs Fureurs Blancs Menteurs’ literally translated to mean ‘Black Furies White Liars’, Pean denies the occurrence of the Genocide, instead blaming the killings to Tutsis. Extremist Hutus hacked to death an estimated one million ethnic Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus between April and July, 1994, and later crossed to DRC after RPF took over Kigali and halted the slaughters across the nation. Genocide survivors now say that unless individual clearly disassociate themselves from Genocide perpetrators and sympathisers, the probe may be far from being resolved. Speaking from Canada on Saturday, one of the panellists, Mujawayo, said that recent remarks by FDLR president Dr Ignace Murwanashyaka on a BBC Kinyarwanda-Kirundi programme, was an indication of continued international community’s failure to resolutely fight Genocide agenda. Murwanashyaka’s remarks sparked anger in Kigali, which criticised the act of airing opinions of the man who heads a Genocidal force and whose last year’s flight to Germany from DRC was in violation of financial and travel sanctions imposed on him by UN Security Council late 2005. Ends